Monday, July 09, 2007

So we're off to a running start. The additional wireless access points appear to be working. Aistė (POV) and the Open End team have been putting in a lot of overtime, and their efforts are paying off.

Feeling my jet lag, I was starting to stumble back to my hotel yesterday when I spotted Guido in the lobby, sitting with other geeks. He waved me over and I ended up joining in a lengthy conversation that persisted well past midnight (even after Guido himself had gone to bed).

Some old James Bond movie, Sean Connery era, was playing on the flatscreen in the hotel lobby.

Guido yet hadn't heard of the Python Bridge in Amsterdam, which I showed him in my slides. Using his knowledge of Amsterdam's geography, he was able to spot it from above, using Google Maps on my new Ubuntu laptop.

This morning I chaired the track in Zeta (all the rooms have greek letter names), introducing the speakers -- except the first guy never showed, meaning Christian Theune got some extra time to share about persisting objects in the ZODB. He was modeling how application developers might want to save state between processes using the infrastructure, completely independently of any Zope application.

Gustavo Niemeyer of Canonical talked about Storm, a system for talking to more traditional relational databases in the tradition of SQLObjects and SQLAlchemy. Questions focused on why these latter two systems weren't "good enough."

Now I'm listening to Max Ischenko from Kiev, discussing his experience rebuilding what had been a PHP website in Pylons, a web development library. He likes Mako for templating, which supports Unicode quite well (important for internationalization). TurboGears will probably move from CherryPy to Pylons in the next release. Babel will be a new i18n library. WSGI will be important.

Jeroen Vloothuis is introducing KSS, Kinetic Style Sheets, a way to implement AJAX with a lot less JavaScript. The events to trigger a JavaScript library get defined in a CSS-like file. KSS has been integrated into Plone.

Graham Stratton is discussing FormEncode, a module for validating HTML forms from within Python.

After lunch: my own talk, followed by an excellent presentation on optimizing MySQL by David Axmark, a cofounder of the company.